Our Steamin’ Hot Testbed refused retirement despite stiff competition from newer, hotter candidates. As such, this old-bird setup continues to be responsible for torturing the Vostok we have on test.

CPU

Pentium 4 Prescott 670 @ 1.36V

Motherboard

Sapphire 17RS400

Memory

2 X 1GB Cosair XMS PRO 3500LL (2GB Dual Channel Kit)

Video Card

Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce 6600 DDR2

Power Supply

Antec Truepower 550W

For the purpose of a heatload, we chose Intel’s Pentium 4 Prescott 670, clocked at 3.8GHz with a whopping 2MB of L2 cache.

Possibly one of the hottest single core CPU of today, it’s the 90nm King Of NetBurst.

It’s hotter than it looks

Temperature readings were taken off the ITE IT8712F device on the Sapphire 17RS400 via SpeedFan 4.27. For the purpose of this test, the internal temperature diode of the Intel Pentium 4 Prescott 670 proved most capable of discerning minor temperature differences, being affected neither by the mounting position/pressure of an external temperature probe nor the probe’s local heat capacity. It is also representative of today’s desktop processors, since it sports a nickel plated copper Integrated Heat Spreader commonly seen in all desktop CPUs.

To load the Intel Pentium 4 670 (both the main CPU and the logical HT core), we ran an instance of Prime95 (in-place large FFTs for maximum heat, power consumption) along with 32M Super Pi calculation. The 100% CPU loading lasts for 20 minutes after initiation. The highest temperature detected by SpeedFan 4.27 is defined the load temperature.

Idle temperatures were recorded 20 minutes after the setup booted into Windows XP SP2. The highest temperature detected after the idle period without load is defined the idle temperature.

C1E (a power saving feature acquainted with SpeedStep and akin to Cool”n”Quiet by AMD) was blatantly disabled in the BIOS to ensure the Intel Pentium 4 670 maintains a constant heat output.